corruption quotes

Some people will have to be afraid. Those who plunder the nation, deliver injustice, will have to feel scared of me. And I am not afraid of admitting this. Government cannot be so lenient that it forgives them.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other’s speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.

The biggest problem that we have is that California is being run now by special interests. All of the politicians are not anymore making the moves for the people, but for special interests and we have to stop that.

Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption.

Putin sought to keep Ukraine weak through corruption.

Ken Lay, the disgraced former chairman of Enron, found a way to escape his legal problems: He died after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

To me, ideology is corrupt; it’s a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you’re an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you’re religious, there’s a mystery left there.

Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs.

Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Richard Nixon was an evil man – evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.

Corruption is one of the most common reasons I hear in views that criticize aid.

If something can corrupt you, you’re corrupted already.

When a nation is over-reliant on one or two commodities like oil or precious minerals, corrupt government ministers and their dodgy associates hoard profits and taxes instead of properly allocating them to schools and hospitals.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

Fighting corruption is not just good governance. It’s self-defense. It’s patriotism.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Greece needs to work on a cleaner image. It’s a big problem, as they have this reputation of being so corrupt.

I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.

Corruption is just another form of tyranny.

There’s no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, ‚The government’s corrupt,‘ and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.

Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.

The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Whenever the speech is corrupted so is the mind.

Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.

Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.

I groan daily under a body of sin and corruption. Oh for the time when I shall drop this flesh, and be free from sin!

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Where do the evils like corruption arise from? It comes from the never-ending greed. The fight for corruption-free ethical society will have to be fought against this greed and replace it with ‚what can I give‘ spirit.